


Dreaming the Fox

by featherxquill



Category: The Infinite Bad (Podcast)
Genre: Dreams, F/M, Season 5 spoliers, Weirdness, a vague sense of sexual threat, idek ok just go with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 16:51:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15369012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/pseuds/featherxquill
Summary: But huge and mighty forms, that do not liveLike living men, moved slowly through the mindBy day, and were a trouble to my dreams.





	Dreaming the Fox

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Myx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myx/pseuds/Myx) for the beta!
> 
> Summary is Wordsworth.
> 
> This is a weird one, folks, but I hope you like it!

In her dreams, Cornelia’s feet are bare. 

The soil beneath her feet is loamy and cool, and she can feel its damp worming up between her toes as she walks. 

She is in a forest of thick, towering firs: their branches eerily symmetrical in the moonlight, trunks as straight as so many soldiers, stretching off into the darkness. 

She walks. She is dressed only in her nightgown, but the garment is unlike anything she has ever owned in life, a patchwork of silk and lace with diagonal stitching. The lace clings to her form in a way that is almost unseemly, and the silk billows out around her, then falls against her skin in a cool caress. The fabric is white, reflective in the moonlight, half bridal gown and half burial shroud. 

She walks. Her progress is slow but not laboured; meditative - she knows where she is going, although she does not know what she will find at her destination. There is a pull - sometimes below her navel and sometimes between her shoulder blades - drawing her on and through. 

Some of the trees have faces. They are not carved - there is no suggestion of human life here - but as she passes the trunks she can see that bark has grown in ways that resemble eye sockets and twisted, gaping mouths. 

She is not afraid, not in the usual sense. She knows that her body is safe (her body is not here? It is a question, because she knows she is dreaming so this should be apparent, but it isn’t, not entirely) - no creature is going to come bursting out of the trees at her; there will be no sharp branches or sudden pitfalls. But there is some disquiet, a looming question: is her spirit here, wherever ‘here’ is, and is it in danger?

She walks. The night air is cool and damp, and her hair, which was braided when she went to bed but is here unbound, sits warmly against the back of her neck in contrast to it. Along with her attire, this detail tells her that she is not here in her own image. She is herself, but someone or something other has created this reality, and drawn her here to be within it. 

Her sense of where she is going is stronger now, although the landscape remains unchanged. She feels _arrival_ in her skin, and then abruptly steps into a clearing and comes to a stop. There is a fire burning that she could not see moments ago. 

He is waiting. 

The man in the fox mask stands by the fire, watching her. Cornelia’s eyes are drawn to that uncanny visage, to his dark eyes that are the only facial feature visible beneath a pelt that is uncommonly red and improbably large. She cannot read his gaze at this distance, but the fox face tilts to the side in a gesture that Cornelia reads as greeting, or challenge. 

She takes a step forward. 

He is naked. The first time she saw him, that fact was distant and indistinct, but not now. Now, she must confront the vivid masculinity of him, cannot help but notice the way firelight and shadow highlight the powerful muscles of his shoulders and chest and sculpt the lines of his pelvic bone into an arrow that points directly at his penis, hanging heavy and flaccid from a dark thicket of hair. 

Cornelia wants to run, wants to turn and flee back into the trees away from this menace, but she knows without understanding how that if she did she would only return to this place, as inexorable as breathing. Also, despite herself, she finds she wants to move closer. There is something potent about him, something primal, something she doesn’t understand but that she recognises with a part of herself that sings from the beginning of time. 

She steps forward and he moves, extending an arm to beckon her closer. She feels the heat of the fire now as her feet carry her forward, and the light glints in his eyes. They are sharp and confident, perhaps amused, and when he tilts his head back that impression grows even stronger because it looks like the fox is smiling. 

The light paints his skin orange, reflects, she realises, off a chest that is smooth and hairless. The fire seems to grow as she steps closer, swirling behind her, around them. Its dancing movement makes the fox seem alive, ears twitching, nose flaring. She can smell it, the fox, musky and powerful, but tempered with earth, with oil, with something that’s _his_. Unable to stop herself, she reaches out, and as her hand touches his chest, she catches a brief impression of something ancient and powerful and wild, and then the dream ends and she shudders into wakefulness.

~*~

Next time, there is sand beneath her feet.

Cornelia finds herself standing on a vast desert plain under a sky studded with stars. A chill wind whips sand against her ankles and cuts through her clothing like a knife. She looks down at herself and finds that her gown is even less substantial than before, dark like the night but gauzy and transparent. The wind pulls at the fabric so it grazes across her nipples, and she feels dangerously exposed. 

Moonlight illuminates her, casting her shadow long and spider-like against the sand, and at the edges of its light she can see shapes, dark things crawling and writhing at just enough distance that she can’t quite make them out. On the horizon, peaked dunes are silhouetted against the purple sky, and they too seem to move as she watches, rising and falling as though breathing. 

The fire flares to life behind her, absent one moment and blazing the next, and she sees the shapes recede at its light, burrowing and fleeing with an insectoid screech. 

She takes a moment to gather herself before she turns, knowing what she’ll find. 

He is squatting on the opposite side of the fire from her, and for a moment the fox mask seems to hover, disembodied and strange, before her eyes can make out the shape of his limbs. 

“Who are you?” she asks, her voice echoing strangely in the night. She hadn’t known if she would have one until she used it. 

He does not reply, and after a moment she becomes aware that he is not still. His shape is masked by the firelight, but she can see well enough that he is making some obscene motion with his hand, staring at her all the while. Her eyes widen in horror and her limbs fill with the dizzying urge to flee, but all that electricity merely shakes her as she stares, transfixed. 

“Who are you?” she asks again, but finds that her voice falters this time, cracking with fear and energy. 

Again he makes no reply, but rises, and as he steps through the fire she notices for the first time that there are no logs or coals at the core of it - the desert itself is burning. The flames part for him, or perhaps sluice around him, licking at his body but not catching as he moves. 

His arms come through first, and they look burnished. When he steps out, every part of his body is golden brown, save one: his cock is red, turgid and jutting. He steps forward. 

Cornelia is frozen, torn between flight and…something else. Her mind seethes with wrongness but her body rattles and burns, seized by the urge to reach out. Her need terrifies her. It’s compulsion, she thinks, but knows it for a lie, and he moves closer as she stands there, paralysed by indecision. 

He reaches out for her, and her inertia snaps. 

“No,” she whispers, jerking back as his fingers brush her sleeve. Her heart is pounding suddenly, pulse racing. “Nono _no_.” She scrambles away from him, away from the fire, losing purchase on the shifting sand and falling backward into the surrounding darkness. As she lands, she hears a vast shifting like a waterfall, and the clicking carapace of an insect behind her. A huge black shape looms up behind her, and then the dream winks out.

~*~

After the events in Hong Kong, Cornelia falls into a daytime stupor while holding vigil beside Joy’s sickbed.

When she opens her eyes again, she is standing on a riverbank. Dark, murky water laps at her toes, and on either side of the bank the jungle simmers in grey humidity. The sky is bright but sunless. Bruised clouds brew, but the light behind them is enough to see across the river and into the tangled foliage beyond. 

Familiar shapes hang there, swinging in the damp breeze. They are nets, and dangling from them Cornelia recognizes the shapes of feet and arms - fetid corpses clustered like overripe fruit. She dares not turn around to see what is behind her. 

There is a closer shape, too. On the opposite bank, the fox-faced man lies unmoving, covered in blood. Cornelia stares at him, feeling something large rise in her chest and up into her throat, and she shudders with the force of it. She should be glad. After seeing the horrifying monster that Peter Fairbank became, she should rejoice at seeing this creature so reduced. He has been haunting her dreams for so long. 

But this is not Peter Fairbank. Peter Fairbank is dead. This is...someone else. 

She wants to know. Her feet splash into the water as she takes an involuntary step forward, then stops. The river is wide, a larger stretch than she could ever hope to cross in life. It comes to her, though, as clearly as anything she has ever known, that she can manage it here. If she wants to. 

She wades in. The water is not as cool as she might have expected, but it grows deep quickly, and very soon her feet lose purchase on the sand. The water parts easily under her hands, but as she swims she becomes aware of large and indistinct shapes moving beneath her, here a pale curve at the edge of her vision and there a gentle bump against her calf. They do not attack her, but there is a sense of danger; she perceives a feeling of primordial hunger, and as she skims the surface of the water she cannot escape the sensation that she is crossing an unfathomable depth, her tiny human form tightroping across a chasm as bottomless as time itself. 

She feels a whole lot colder by the time she reaches the other side. 

Emerging onto the bank, she approaches the fox man cautiously, mindful that this could be a trap. Dry sand sticks to her damp feet as she moves closer. His eyes are open, watching her, but he doesn’t move. 

She inspects him. The blood on his body comes from dozens of wounds across his torso and thighs, deep gashes embedded with glass. It trickles down from beneath the mask, too, like the fox’s throat is freshly cut, or like his face is mangled beneath it. There’s an echo here of the injuries the Fairbank creature sustained in life, but they’re distorted, a dream representation of a harsher reality. They are clearly real, though; as real as anything can be in this place. 

Cornelia doesn’t immediately know what she intends to do. The fox man is grotesque, oddly pale and, she notices, strangely damp. Moisture clings to him, but it doesn’t look like sweat, and the sand around him is dry. It looks almost membranous, sticky, as though he is a thing newly born. Her eyes are drawn up to his face again, or rather to the fox skin that passes for his face, and she shudders. Despite the weird newness of his body, the eyes that stare at her from the sockets of the mask are old, too familiar, and in pain. 

She drops to her knees in the sand. When she reaches out, she notices that her hands are shaking - though with nervousness or indecision, she isn’t sure. Nevertheless, she grasps one of the glass shards between her forefinger and thumb and pulls it out. It slides free with surprising ease, but it’s large: longer than her finger and wickedly sharp. She discards it carefully and looks at him again. He blinks slowly. It seems like thanks. 

The second shard comes out as easily as the first, and Cornelia gets to work. The fox man’s skin is indeed tacky, and as fresh blood oozes from his many wounds it mixes strangely with the viscous film that covers him, turning into thick, painted smears. She isn’t sure why she’s doing this, refuses to interrogate herself beyond the moment. The only possible motivation she allows herself to consider is the thought of Joy’s disease-riddled body elsewhere (right beside her? A million miles away?) and the vague hope that by doing this thing she might be righting some balance in the universe that will allow her to not lose anyone else. Any other reasoning is simply academic, or too terrifying to consider. 

When she removes the last of the shards, he lies motionless still, though Cornelia thinks he may have regained some colour - and not just from the bloody handprints that now decorate his body. The most prominent of these frames his belly button, a full outline of her left hand from the moment she splayed it across his abdomen to steady herself as she leaned across him to remove a piece lodged in his right shoulder. It is stark evidence of an intimacy she wouldn’t normally allow, but now it emboldens her, and she meets his eyes for a moment before dropping her gaze to the place where the mask ends and his neck begins. Her fingers touch the blood there, trace the sticky edge of pelt, and lift it just a fraction. 

His hand catches her wrist. His grip is stronger than she would have expected, perhaps desperate, and when she makes eye contact with him she can see something approaching panic there. What timid courage she felt does not last under his gaze, and she desists, letting her fingers fall away. She’s not sure she wants to know exactly what face is beneath the mask (and not solely because it may be disfigured). 

After a moment, he drops her hand, and with the other he reaches out toward the water, pointing feebly. For a moment, she doesn’t understand - how does he expect to drink if he will not remove the mask? But he lifts his shoulders just slightly, more gesture than movement, and she comprehends. 

He is heavy, but not too hard for her to manage when she gets her hands under his shoulders, and it is a downward slope to the water. She drags him into the shallows and kneels there with him, supporting his weight against her knees. Sticky tendrils of blood dilute and disperse into the water, and when she runs a hand over his chest his stains wash away, wounds growing smaller even as she watches. 

Curious shapes crowd around them as she washes him, hungry and old and drawn by the scent of blood. They don’t come too close and she doesn’t look at them, instead focusing her attention on his body, which feels more familiar by the second. She washes his throat and he closes his eyes and dips his head back into the water, and when he lifts it again his eyes are even more recognisable than before. 

“I don’t want this,” she whispers, even as she cradles him.

~*~

It is snowing outside of Dorothy’s house, but the back door is wide open. Cornelia finds herself standing in the parlour, the shapes of now familiar furniture mere blobs in the half light. Outside, bright moonlight reflects off the snow, but its glare barely penetrates the interior of the room.

Cornelia moves toward the open door, and on its threshold she is greeted by an awesome sight. The garden, usually a small patch of open space hemmed in by struggling plants, has transformed into a vast snowy wilderness that stretches as far as her eyes can see. For about a hundred yards, it is nothing but a pristine white plane, and beyond that, ghostly trees stretch high into the sky. Through them, in the distance, there is the warm speck of a fire already burning. 

It has been a long time since Cornelia has visited this place, but it seems it has been waiting for her. 

She steps over the threshold. Her feet are bare, but there is no sudden shock of cold when they make contact with the snow, just a soft crunch with only the barest hint of temperature. The air is similarly tranquil - the night is cool but still, the snow insulating. She is untroubled by the gauzy gown that has become her usual attire here. 

Cornelia walks towards the light. As she moves, the distance seems to expand and contract - at one moment she seems to be in a limitless desert of bright white snow, just her alone under the moon, and in the next she is approaching the line of trees. As she reaches them she glances back the way she has come, and it looks just the way it did from the house: a hundred yards of pristine snow, now marred with a pattern of footprints. 

She turns back toward the trees, and takes a breath. 

She is not sure whether she should be afraid or not. Time, like temperature and physics, seems to be a malleable concept in this place (and she is as sure as she can be, at this point, that it _is_ a place, at least by some understanding of the word), but she has been absent from it for so long that she cannot know what to expect, and is not sure why she has returned. Has their recent ordeal reawoken something, or is she simply more receptive to it once again? The latter idea scares her more than the possibility of what she will find. 

She is drawn through the trees not by compulsion this time but by the guiding light and her own curiosity, a determination to find out what will be. Her motivation seems to make the space contract, and before long she has reached the clearing where the fire burns. 

He is waiting for her, but this time he is suitably clothed. A black tuxedo cuts a sharp line across his shoulders, bow tie sitting just below the chin of the mask, and Cornelia feels more comfortable with him like this. She takes a step forward even as his hand comes up to touch his collar. He looks down at himself then back to her, and in his eyes she reads surprise. He recovers from it quickly, hand playing at smoothing his buttons, but in that moment Cornelia understands that he hadn’t been expecting to find himself so attired. He has drawn her here, but somehow - and the _how_ of it is the important question - she has managed to shape the place to her liking at least in some small way. Perhaps by surrendering, by acknowledging the reality of this world, she has gained some control over it. 

She regards him steadily for several moments, feeling the night air pulse around them, then asks, “What do you want from me?” Her voice echoes, bouncing off the snow, and it sounds powerful. He tilts his head, assessing her. The pulse of the air becomes a hum that she can feel in her bones, and at length it seems to take on a melody, a thing not so much heard as thrumming through this entire world. The place seems to be growing smaller, contracting around them, and when she listens, Cornelia thinks she can feel its edges. 

He breaks his stillness, bowing as one would at a formal dance. Eyes sparkling with challenge, he extends his hand to her.

Cornelia takes it. 

Immediately, he pulls her in. She doesn’t resist as his free hand curls around her waist, splaying out against her back and tugging her closer than any formal event would dictate. Instead, she brings her own hand up to rest against his bicep, perfectly posed. The air sings and she follows the flow of it, relaxing into his grip and feeling the energy of this place vibrate with approval, bending around her. She arches an eyebrow at him, a challenge of her own, and he steps her back into motion. 

They dance. It’s strange at first: the melody they can feel has no real rhythm, but they move despite it, and soon they make one, the air responding to their steps by turning into a waltz. It’s a soaring, glittery sort of tune: winter brought to life, and Cornelia can feel the snow kicked up and swirling around her feet even as heat grows between them. 

Like any woman of her upbringing, Cornelia is an experienced dancer, and here she feels unencumbered by the limitations of her sometimes awkward body. She follows his lead effortlessly, doesn’t flinch when he pulls her closer and spins her toward the fire. They circle it, wheeling around the central point, shoulders loose and motion fluid. Her hand feels very warm in his.

Changing direction, he guides her back around the fire in a wider arc. She follows, and their speed increases as he challenges her, lowering their joined hands to turn her faster and faster. The rhythm matches them, tempo growing, and the trees seem to bend toward them as they move. He releases her and they spin away from each other, then he pulls her back and lifts his arm to twirl her beneath it. Her gown spins around her, fanning the flames but not catching, and when he pulls her back her hand catches his arm and the atmosphere fairly crackles between them. Their dream forms seem to mould against each other, perfectly matched. 

Matched. At her thought the tune changes, slows, a heavy vibration that resolves itself into a melody Cornelia knows. It’s a wedding song - _her_ wedding song - and her step falters as she resists this cruel parody. In the next moment, though, her eyes meet his, and she cannot deny her recognition any longer. They’re quiet eyes, clever eyes, eyes that she spent far too little time being able to look into. Something tight and heavy fills her chest, but she moves with him still as he guides her, and the heat between them simmers to a glow as he cradles her close. 

“I don’t…” she whispers, but it’s a lie, and lies will break the spell of this place. She falls silent and moves with him, gives in to this reality, and at length she lays her head against his chest as they sway together in the snow. 

When the tune ends, there are tears on her cheeks. 

“Why?” she asks, when she looks up again. “Why are you here? _How_ are you here?”

As ever, he is silent, but that’s not enough for her this time. She disentangles her arms, reaches up. He takes a step back as though to stop her, but she bends her will and feels this place respond to her, and he freezes in his tracks. 

Cornelia moves forward, reaching up to touch the fox’s pelt. She can feel the human warmth beneath it, and fancies she can even feel his pulse under its skin. 

“Enough,” she says, and removes the mask.

~*~

Cornelia had hoped never to see this place again, but here she is. With her fevered body in the grip of malaria, she can’t resist her mind being drawn in once again. She feels cold stone beneath her feet, and she knows where she’ll be before she even opens her eyes.

The cavern is even more vast than it was in life, monoliths stretching in every direction like an endless hall of mirrors. They tower over her, reaching right up to the ceiling, and they seem to breathe as she looks at them, the strange script carved upon them pulsing with life. There is light, flickering as though from the glow of torches, but it seems to be coming from behind the pillars - she gets the sense that it would always be behind, even if she were to walk through this place for hours. 

As it is, she doesn’t need to walk anywhere. Brendel is waiting for her. 

He looks exactly as he did when she last saw him, grey and distinguished as he never should have been. Even here, the sight of him like this causes such a raging conflict of emotion in her - grief, pain, longing, anger - that she wants to deny his reality, flee into her mind and claim him nothing more than a fever dream. 

But he is not. He is here now in his real skin just as he came to be here before beneath the mask; to deny it would only be to give him power in this place. And she will never allow him to have power over her again. 

“My love,” he says, and moves toward her. 

She lets him come. His arms are outstretched, his face full of naked longing, and she lets him get within reach before she draws her arm back and slaps him hard across the face. 

“You bastard,” she hisses as he reels, clutching his cheek. “You absolute, utter _bastard_.”

He holds his face and stares at her, shock written all over his features. “Cornelia,” he whispers, and his voice is like a dagger, far too unchanged with age. She still remembers when he whispered her name on their wedding night, or said it in wonder after their son was born. She hates how much his voice makes her feel. “Why…?” he asks, and she snaps. 

“ _Why?_ ” As she launches herself forward, the firelight flares. The place responds to her and she aims another blow that he only just blocks, so she twists her will and clips his ear with her other hand. “ _Why?_ I mourned you for forty years; I never remarried!” The air hums around her and she feeds it rage, uses it to rain down blows on him until she is no longer conscious of where they land. “I chased your memory around the world and neglected our son, and all the while you were...you were…” She still can’t finish the sentence, and in an instant the rage-energy abandons her. Shaking now, she lands one final, feeble blow against his shoulder - he is half-crouched, arms up to protect his head - then turns away, hiding her face from him as she claws angry tears from her eyes. 

When she turns back, he is standing again, tentatively touching a finger to his bottom lip, which is split and bloody. She isn’t sorry. He looks up at her again, and in his eyes she still sees confusion.

“But you,” he begins, as his tongue flickers out to wet his cut lip, which heals as he continues: “you saved us. When we were injured in Hong Kong, you helped me rise, helped us heal.”

Cornelia feels the place quiver as she stifles a sudden nausea. “Us?” she asks.

“We are all always here,” he says, “although we wear different faces. A blow to one is a blow to us all. It could have taken us decades to recover if you hadn’t assisted us.”

“No,” Cornelia whispers, and takes a step back on wobbly legs. The monuments seem to shift, mirroring themselves, their inscriptions writhing. 

Brendel nods. “And you danced with me. I thought you were coming around to our view of the world.”

She shakes her head and her vision blurs, the scene swimming in front of her eyes as though about to dissolve. Her mind can barely fathom the implications of what he’s saying, fights against any admission of guilt. But she _had_ seen his face in Hong Kong - she had to admit that, no matter how many times she’d tried to convince herself that she’d imagined it. She never told the others, not even Joy; never explained why she had demanded that they cut off contact for those five years. In her darker moments, she’d wondered what she might do, what she might let happen, to have him back or see him again, but that was when…

The scene snaps back into focus. “That was when I thought you were dead. I thought you were lost and trying to find your way back to me. I told myself that the man I loved would never have _chosen_... But you did.”

“You don’t _understand_ , Cornelia,” he says, and here his eyes take a fanatical light; the obelisks bend towards him. “The things I have seen, they’re larger than anything you could ever imagine in ordinary reality, they’re-”

She cuts him off, and the monuments straighten once again. “I know what _I’ve_ seen. Soldiers, good men who served their country, butchered like animals; cities full of crawling monsters. Whole villages, _children_ , ripped apart, and for what? So some select few can try their hand at immortality? You had a wife who loved you and a son who could have known you; what have you got now?”

For a moment, she sees humanity in his eyes, a trace of the man she’d pledged her life to. But it’s only a flash, a fleeting image of horror and regret, and then his face may as well be a mask once again. He seems to recede into the world, his edges indistinct, almost two-dimensional. “I have forever,” he says. 

Cornelia sighs, and her chest is a hollow ache. “I really was right, wasn’t I? You’re not the man I married. You’re barely a man at all.”

She regards him for a few more moments, watching him as he impassively accepts her judgement, merges against the background. She wants to remember him just as he is here, etch this inhuman image in her mind, because she is determined to move on from this. She had loved him once, right to the bottom of her soul, but there’s nothing left of that man in this crude sketch. It hurts to know how willingly he gave away his humanity, but give it away he did, and she will not waste even one more minute grieving for him. 

“Enjoy your eternity alone,” she says. “I will not be coming back here.”

And with that, she closes her eyes, grasps the edges of this world, and snaps her mind shut on it for good.


End file.
